


Ghost Town

by transubstantiate



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-18
Updated: 2014-07-18
Packaged: 2018-02-09 08:56:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1976835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/transubstantiate/pseuds/transubstantiate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU in which Steve dies while Bucky is overseas and Bucky and Natasha still manage to find each other</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ghost Town

Bucky fears the worst when he stops getting letters from Steve a year into the war, and when he finally stumbles back into the city, (bruised, broken, shell-shocked) all his worst nightmares come true, and the next thing he knows he’s standing in front of a headstone marked “Steve Rogers, 1918 - 1943.”

There’s something that people do when they’re sad, he knows, but he can’t remember how to do it, how to let go of the horrible emptiness, so he wraps it around itself and puts it down at the center of him and pushes away everything else.

The emptiness occupies the place where Steve used to glow.

He drinks, then. He drinks and he yells and he gets into stupid, stupid fights, fights like the ones he used to wade into and pull Steve out of, except Steve had a mission and all Bucky is looking for is punishment.

His job in the factory is repetitive, numbing, and if there was something good in his life, then the daily reprieve from having to think further than where his hands are is that (In one of his occasional moments of self-awareness, he laughs at the fact that what he looks forward to is nothingness. The laugh is bitter and angry, a crude caricature of what it once was, and that sinks him right back down into the fog). 

The woman shows up one night when he’s trashing his room in a drunken haze. She’s sitting on the fire escape, smoking, and he’s caught still for a moment by the sight of her, held in thrall because she glows, she glows just like Steve did and he didn’t know that anyone else could be so bright, could look like liquid light and sudden warmth, could stop his breath and make his eyes burn. 

She catches his eye, smiles, waves, and hops off the fire escape into the room.

_You need a roommate, yes?_ She asks in broken, accented English, and when he nods dumbly she laughs and presses a kiss to his cheek. 

She’s not there when he wakes up in the morning, and she’s not there when he returns from the factory, and he knows then that he dreamed her, or wished her, and the emptiness inside him grows.

She’s smoking on the fire escape two days later. _A second bed,_ she calls through the open window when he comes into the room. _I will not share._

Russian. Her accent is Russian.

He shivers himself to sleep that night, despite the hot, sticky weather.

There’s a mattress on the floor the next time she appears on the fire escape, and she pokes it with her foot but it seems to pass muster, because she doesn’t comment. Instead she turns on her heel, surveying the room.

Bucky musters his courage and asks, _What’s your name?_ To which she gives him a hard, tight smile and says, _I am called Natasha._

Natasha, Natasha with no last name, Natasha who pays him in American money and barely speaks English, Natasha who smokes more than most men he knows, Natasha who never drinks, Natasha who fucks men during the week and women on the weekends.

All Bucky can do is drink in her brilliance. 

He gets fired from his job at the factory, he gets into more fights, he drinks less, he can’t afford his rent.

Natasha gives him more money. 

He stays out one night walking the city, nursing a broken left hand, wishing he had money for booze, and when he gets back home, Natasha is standing in the middle of the room.

She’s covered in blood.

She’s holding a gun.

_Hello, Bucky,_ she says, tossing him another dazzling smile. _Would you like to help me clean up?_

He reaches out, hesitantly, and touches her arm, rubs the blood that comes away between his fingers, gets a rag, wets it, and wipes her face first.

She kisses him when her face is clean.

She kisses him again when her arms are free of blood.

They fuck when he wipes down her legs.

_I’m leaving,_ she tells him when they’re done. He starts to nod, dumbly again, and is struck by a sudden bolt of fury with himself. 

_Where? Take me with you._

She toys with his broken fingers, watches his face pale with pain. _You will only bleed,_ she whispers.

_Bleeding is the only thing I’m good at, sweetheart,_ he says, and she kisses him again, and maybe it might mean something this time, because she sighs into it and touches his cheek tenderly, and if there was any doubt in Bucky’s mind that he would follow her into hell, it vanishes.

He would do anything for her. He promises himself that, like he promised himself that he would do anything for Steve, that he would protect Steve always, because Steve glowed, Steve was light and joy and everything Bucky wasn’t.

And Natasha is a different quality of light, but all light needs a shadow.

And Bucky is so, so good at being a shadow.


End file.
